'Inception': Summer's Best, Most Disappointing Blockbuster

A man washes up unconscious on a foreign beach. He is awakened
by armed guards, and, delirious, speaks a name to them. The guards take
him to a palatial home where he meets the bearer of that name, a man
grown rich and wrinkled with the passage of years. The old man asks
him, "Are you here to kill me?"

This might easily have
been the opening of an austere, hypnotic noir, Raymond Chandler by way
of Paul Bowles. Instead, it is the opening of the summer's most
mind-bending action entertainment, Christopher Nolan's Inception. And
if the early reviews are any indication, I may be very nearly alone in
my disappointment.

First, the good news, of which there
is plenty. Inception, Nolan's first picture since The Dark Knight put
him in the billion-dollar-movie club, is a sharp and intricate
diversion, and easily the summer's best blockbuster to date. (Yes, this
may accurately be deemed faint praise; no, it's not intended as
damnation.) Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Dom Cobb, who may sound like a
salad but has the look and disposition of a lean slice of beef. Cobb is
a thief of the subconscious, the best in the world at the art of
"extraction," or breaking and entering the dreams of the powerful in
order to purloin their secrets.

His first target in the film is Saito
(Ken Watanabe), an energy industrialist whose competitors would like to
get a look under his hood. Though the mission fails, Saito is impressed
enough by Cobb's effort that he offers to forgive the
trespass—provided, of course, that Cobb perform him a service in
return. What Saito demands, however, is a more delicate operation than
the psychic burglary in which Cobb typically specializes: rather than
pilfer an idea from the subconscious of his corporate adversary, Robert
Fischer (Cillian Murphy), Saito contracts Cobb to implant one. (Hence,
"inception.")

Befitting any proper heist movie, Cobb's
mission begins with the assembly of a team. (Lest we be caught
unprepared, Saito commands, "Assemble a team.") Cobb dutifully rounds
up Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the right-hand man; Eames (Tom
Hardy), the "forger," able to impersonate the dreamer's trusted friends
and allies; Ariadne (Ellen Page), the architecture student tasked with
designing the dreamscapes in which the operation will take place; and
Yusuf (Dileep Rao), the sedative specialist responsible for making sure
no one wakes up before the mission is complete. The job itself is to
take place on three levels of escalating subliminality: a dream within
a dream within a dream, each meticulously designed to lower their
subject's resistance to the suggestion they seek to embed.

The
requisite complications ensue. Among them is the belated discovery that
Fischer's subconscious has been "militarized"—that is, trained to repel
psychic invasion—with the upshot that Cobb et al. spend the latter half
of the film being shot at by dreamworld security. (Envision The
Matrix's Agent Smith, minus the sneer and sunglasses.) Worse, the team
is haunted, with intensifying animosity, by Cobb's dead wife, Mal
(Marion Cotillard), whose guilt-ridden memory (backstory alert!) he
cannot—and perhaps does not wish to—leave behind.

Nolan's
film overflows with narrative ingenuity and cinematic showmanship.
Snatches of dialogue recur, their meanings refracted through levels of
reality and unreality. Gordon-Levitt tousles with henchmen in a
rotating hotel hallway, putting to shame his own anti-gravity acrobatics on SNL. Allusions to Penrose stairs
rub elbows with canny wordplay (e.g., "Mal," whose name conjures both
"moll" and the French term for her predisposition). Four concurrent
climaxes are piled one atop another on interdependent dream layers.
And, perhaps most impressive, Nolan assembles the kaleidoscopic
elements into a nearly seamless whole and buffs it all to an immaculate
polish.

Quibbles can be found for those inclined to
look. It is quickly evident to viewers, though somehow not to his
teammates, that Cobb's deep psychic scars make him perhaps the least
reliable dreamcrasher imaginable. (It can hardly be a good sign that,
around the two-hour mark, Cobb confesses, "There's something you should
know about me—about inception.") And bravura editing notwithstanding,
the four-headed finale tends to undercut the impact of each of its
components. It's one thing to marvel at a master juggler, but rather
another to feel as if you are one of the balls.

In the end, it may be Inception's greatest strength, its precision
engineering, that also proves its signal weakness. Nolan has always
been a nimble, meticulous director, but his best work has exceeded such
technical virtues. His first major film, Memento, may have taken the
form of a gimmick movie, but it transcended its own structural
ingenuity to become one of the most unique and resonant tragedies of
the past 25 years. His last movie, The Dark Knight, was also
his messiest, with flaws that included a collapsing final act. Yet it,
too, perhaps in part thanks to that messiness, found unexpected grandeur and gravity in its subject.

For
all its elegant construction, Inception is a film in which nothing
feels comparably at stake. (In this it resembles Nolan's The Prestige,
another admirably heady tale of perception and reality that never quite
found a hearty emotional grip.) The dangers that loom with the failure
of Cobb's mission range from the inconsequential (Saito's firm goes out
of business!) to the inauthentic (Cobb won't be able to return to
pretty, talismanic children he was forced to abandon: parenthood as
MacGuffin). The sorrow of Cobb and Mal's doomed marriage, too, for all
of Cotillard's hypnotic allure, feels nonetheless remote, a motivation
in search of real meaning. Though questions may linger at the film's
conclusion, they are less likely to be moral than mechanical: How many
minutes of dream-time comprise a minute of waking life? How, again, did
the heroes wake themselves up from their ultimate dream?

Like
his protagonist, Nolan excels as an implanter of subversive ideas. This
time, alas, he didn't dig quite deep enough for them to take root.

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